Vallejo native pens book on Vallejo’s old ‘barbary coast,’ holds book signing Saturday

Brendan Riley poses with his newly released book, ‘Lower Georgia Street: California’s Forgotten Barbary Coast.’ A book signing is planned for Saturday at the Vallejo Naval and Historical Museum.
CONTRIBUTED PHOTO

When Joanne Morriss Schivley walked up Georgia Street with her mother as a girl, she would stay as close to the curb as possible, for fear that someone would reach out from one of the bars and drag her inside.

Vallejo native and longtime reporter/writer Brendan Riley’s new book, “Lower Georgia Street: California’s Forgotten Barbary Coast,” contains recollections like this. The book brings to life games like his sister and her friends would play, sticking a toe over the line between the good and bad sides of Georgia Street in defiance of their parents’ orders to avoid lower Georgia, in the days when “good children” didn’t venture past the 200 block.

A book signing is set for 1 to 3 p.m. Saturday at the Vallejo Naval and Historical Museum, 734 Marin St.

“My sister, Ellen Riley McClure, said she and her friends would run across the Sacramento-Georgia Street intersection, from the ‘good’ side, the 300 block of Georgia, touch a toe on the ‘bad’ side, the 200 block, and then run back across the street before the street light changed from green to red,” Riley said.

This story is one of those that made him laugh as he researched and wrote the book, he said.

Riley, who earned an English degree from St. Mary’s College in Moraga and then spent two years as a sailor aboard a Navy ammunition ship during the Vietnam War, had a 39-year career as a political and government affairs writer for The Associated Press.

After retiring, he returned to Vallejo and got involved in community affairs, editorial consulting and research into Vallejo’s history.

Research for this book started last summer, though Riley said he’d been compiling notes and reading up on city and state history for years.

“Lower Georgia Street” is “something I’d thought about writing for several years,” he said. “To me it’s an important part of Vallejo history. Like it or not, it’s what was going on in our original downtown district for decades. And every time shipyard activity picked up, in times of war, primarily, there would be more ships, meaning more sailors and shipyard workers, and that meant more sailors on lower Georgia Street.”

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This made the area a no-go zone as far as most Vallejo parents were concerned, he said.

“The book is full of anecdotes of people who recall not wasting any time moving through there if they had to,” he said.

This is not to say that lower Georgia was the last circle of Hell, or anything, Riley said.

“It wasn’t a totally unsafe place to be,” he said. “It was still a main street in town, but after hours, it got pretty wild.”

In his research, Riley said he found that warnings from parents to avoid lower Georgia Street predated his own grandparents.

“What I found was that the activity went back so far, people’s great grandmothers could have given that same warning. It went back a long time,” he said. “The realization of how far back it went — to World War I; event to the 1800s — I didn’t realize that.”

And there were some fascinating stories, he said.

“There was the attempt on Vallejo Police Chief Jack Stiltz’s life in the 1950s, which is still a mystery, but he was a reformer and there were people opposed to him,” Riley said. “He was chief throughout the time they bulldozed lower Georgia Street.”

The story never made the newspaper, but came to Riley by way of Stiltz’s son, he said.

“There’s a chapter on Baby Face Nelson that was really fascinating for me,” Riley said. He came as a “guest” of Tobe Williams, an old safe cracker, who ran Vallejo General Hospital. According to FBI reports, though (Nelson) “committed no crime here that we know of, there was a murder during that time that was never solved.”

Nelson and his wife felt safe enough in Vallejo to “walk around town like anybody else, going to the movies, and so on,” despite being, at one point, the most wanted man in the United States, he said.

“The technology we have now didn’t exist which is why he came out to the West Coast; because the FBI was doing most of its searching in the Midwest,” Riley said.

Nelson wasn’t just hanging out in the Bay Area, but ran a bootleg liquor operation from Marin and San Francisco, while on the lam, he said.

Nelson returned to the Chicago area from Vallejo, and was soon killed in a shootout with two FBI agents, Riley said.

“At that time, he was Public Enemy No. One, after John Dillinger died in July 1934,” he said. “Nelson left Vallejo in October 1934 and died that November.”

The unsavory characters and behavior on lower Georgia proved a stubborn problem, that city officials were unable to get a handle on until the idea of “urban renewal” took hold in the 1960s, Riley said.

“There was the whole era of redevelopment and Vallejo got a large piece of federal funding and I think there was an attitude around town to simply bulldoze the thing, because it had been a problem for so long,” he said. “And with it, they also tore down some beautiful landmarks, including businesses and homes in areas outside of lower Georgia. Once they got going, they just cleared out the whole thing — the whole original part of Vallejo. You read the newspaper accounts of the day — 1950s and 60s — and it was really about redevelopment that was going on all around the country. At the same time, there were people who could see no other way to get rid of the problems from lower Georgia outside of bulldozing it.”

No one was thinking about historical preservation, at the time, he said.

In his research, Riley said he encountered “funny and amazing things, as well as serious and tragic things — events that occurred in the district over the years — and I tried to put them all in the book.”

Museum director Jim Kern said he’s sure there’s enough material left over to keep someone busy for a while.

“I’d bet that for every story he put in his book, he’ll get five or six more that could provide an opportunity for a Volume 2,” he said.

In putting together his first book, Riley said he most enjoyed “reading these old accounts in Vallejo’s earliest newspapers, and then being able to put it into a structure that hopefully people can understand. It was a challenge. It was a stimulating process. I liked the research and I liked the writing and I hope people like the book.”

Copies of Lower Georgia Street: California’s Forgotten Barbary Coast are available at the museum and also by mailing Riley at 720 Georgia St., Vallejo 94590.

About the Author

With the Times-Herald since 1999, Rachel Raskin-Zrihen has been a reporter, writer and columnist for several print and online publications for nearly 30 years. She is the married mother of two grown sons and lives locally. Reach the author at rzrihen@timesheraldonline.com
or follow Rachel on Twitter: @rachelvth.